Kenner officials hope to improve city's image

You don't have to go any further than a recent St. Tammany Parish Council meeting to recognize that Kenner has an image problem. The tension was thick, with people in eight St. Tammany neighborhoods lobbying against developers, who wanted to locate an office park on Lonesome Road near Mandeville. One of those residents, William Phillips, knew he needed the perfect line to convey to the council how wrong the offices would be in the minds of neighbors.

This was it: The neighborhoods represent the best of St. Tammany, he said, while the office park represents "the best aspects of Kenner."

The remark "sort of brought the house down," Phillips said. The tension was broken; council members laughed out loud and ultimately rejected the office park, which Phillips described as looking like a strip mall - like one of the many strip malls along Williams Boulevard and West Esplanade Avenue in Kenner.

Why did Phillips, a former Harahan resident, pick Kenner to use in his comment?

"I knew it would get my point across," he said, adding that many St. Tammany residents have moved from Kenner, as well as other places in Jefferson and Orleans parishes, to escape the strip malls and crowds.

That example, along with the results of a host of recent surveys, make it clear that Kenner has a problem in the eyes of people both inside and outside the city. What isn't nearly as clear is how city officials can change the way Kenner is perceived.

Kenner Mayor Mike Yenni has been disheartened to hear community leaders talk about the city's poor image. He has also decried the phrase: "Kenna, brah" or "Kenner, bra," poking fun at the city by ending its name with an "A." T-shirt shops have begun selling shirts with those phrases.

He assembled an economic development committee with a roster that read like a Who's Who of business and politics in Kenner and around the area. The 35 people on the committee includes doctors, lawyers, developers and bankers, city council members, the director of The Esplanade mall and the aviation director of Louis Armstrong International Airport.

At the committee's first meeting seven months ago, members heard the grim results of a demographic study completed by GCR & Associates. Kenner's population decreased 5 percent from 2000 to 2010, to 66,702, according to the 2010 U.S. census. Though Kenner remains slightly wealthier than Jefferson Parish and the New Orleans area, other changes since 2000 are concerning:

An online survey of 200 Kenner residents found that negative perceptions and an inability to attract a younger generation topped the list of perceived threats to the city's prosperity. The survey of 130 mainly non-residents found that people who don't live in Kenner, primarily young adults, don't think much of the city.

The consensus of non-residents is blight and a clutter of billboards and signs in commercial areas give the city no "sense of place."

"People don't sense they have the right quality of life," said Henry Shane, a Kenner resident and real estate developer who is on Yenni's economic committee.

Turning around a city's image is complex, said longtime New Orleans public relations consultant Greg Beuerman.

View full sizeBrett Duke, The Times-PicayuneTraffic on Williams Boulevard in Kenner was photographed on Friday.

To make it successful, he said a city's brand must be "reality-based" and take into account negatives and positives. "You really have to understand who you're appealing to and what you're trying to accomplish," he said.

One challenge is getting the people in the community to stand behind the image change and promote the city to others, Beuerman said.

"The people in that community need to be on board," he said.

And that might not be easy: the survey of Kenner residents showed they were pessimistic about the city's future. Among the residents who took the survey, 46 percent said they expected the city to continue to decline, while only 30 percent said they expected it to improve.

Kenner's location west of New Orleans lead some to consider it "the boonies," meaning, Yenni said, some people don't make the drive to find attractions, such as lakeside subdivisions.

"Kenner is living in the shadow of New Orleans," Beuerman said.

The effort to thrust the city into its own limelight, to promote it as more than a suburb of New Orleans, is underway. "We're not the bedroom community we started out to be," Yenni said. "We're a good community in our own right."

Shane has his own ideas to create Kenner's identity, which would involve major landscaping. "I think we have to create a boutique city," he said, adding that Kenner could become the "garden community of the metro area."

Millions of dollars in expansions are planned for Louis Armstrong International Airport and there are possibilities for commercial development at both ends of the city -- Laketown and Rivertown.

Yenni said that the economic meetings have "opened my eyes to what people want . . .I'm acting based on what I'm hearing."

At his urging, the Kenner City Council last week created a citizen committee to recommend ways to improve code enforcement.

Best-case scenario, Yenni says, is creating a city that Kenner residents would never have to leave. That means more restaurants, more shops and a stadium-style movie theater. For a city so dependent on sales taxes, he said, encouraging more spending in the city is important.

"I'm trying to do anything I can to enhance the economic outlook for this city."